Visa and Tencent Sign MoU to Explore Cross-Border and AI Agent Payments

Shenzhen, China — Chinese internet group Tencent and card network Visa have signed a memorandum of understanding to look at wider cooperation in cross-border payments, agentic commerce, enterprise artificial intelligence and support for companies expanding abroad, Tencent said on October 29.

The agreement sets a framework for exploring joint work rather than listing services that are already live. It pairs Tencent's payment tools, digital platforms and technology with Visa's worldwide network and its products for moving money between countries.

Travel is the first focus. Using Visa Pay and Tencent's cross-border payment platform, TenPay Global, the two companies want to make paying simpler both for visitors arriving in China and for travelers heading out of it. Tencent said the work will center on solutions that let travelers to and from China pay at merchants that take part on both the Weixin Pay and Visa networks, subject to the regulatory rules that apply.

That builds on earlier steps. In November 2019, Visa welcomed Tencent's plan to accept international card schemes in its mobile wallet, saying Visa cardholders would be able to use their cards across China wherever WeChat Pay is taken. In May this year, Tencent reported that transactions by foreign travelers using Weixin Pay with a linked international bank card rose by nearly 80% year-on-year from January to April, and it added a 90-day fee waiver for first-time card users on spending of up to approximately $150 (RMB 1,000) a day.

Remittances are the second strand. The companies plan to widen their work on Visa Direct, Visa's money movement service, so that more senders outside China can transfer funds into the Weixin Pay ecosystem. A 2023 agreement extended the reach of Visa Direct to more than one billion Weixin users in mainland China, when TenPay Global already worked with over 30 remittance institutions in more than 60 countries and territories.

Gaming is another existing link. Midas, Tencent's international payments platform, has a long-standing gaming partnership with Visa, which the companies said has grown into cooperation on joint marketing, global payments and money movement, and risk management. That partnership now reaches Tencent's overseas AI businesses, where the two aim to improve AI payment experiences and look for agentic payment opportunities.

On the technology side, the companies will study how AI and agentic capabilities could make digital commerce easier and more secure while keeping trust, security and consumer control in place. Tencent said that work is subject to applicable regulatory, data-governance and security requirements.

Agentic payments, in which software agents carry out purchases on a person's behalf, sit at the center of that work. Tencent and Visa will explore how Visa Intelligent Commerce could support consumer-controlled experiences where AI agents help eligible users find, choose and buy goods or services. They also plan to cooperate on payment experiences built for developer agents and on emerging AI-native commerce models.

Visa Intelligent Commerce is already being tested elsewhere. Earlier this month, Visa said it was running a live pilot with BILL and Billtrust in which trusted AI agents complete business invoice payments a company has already approved, using Visa Intelligent Commerce and its Trusted Agent Protocol to confirm each agent's identity and permissions.

Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group, said: “Our expanded partnership with Visa builds on our ongoing efforts to better serve users and businesses across Tencent’s ecosystem. By making cross-border payments more convenient and exploring how Tencent Cloud’s AI and agent capabilities can complement Visa’s global network and expertise, we hope to create more seamless commerce experiences for consumers and new opportunities for businesses, both in China and internationally.”

Forest Lin, Corporate Vice President of Tencent and Head of Tencent Financial Technology, added: “As two-way travel and commerce between China and the rest of the world continue to grow, we are pleased to build on our existing partnership with Visa to deepen cross-border payment connectivity and explore new possibilities in AI-powered agentic payments.”

Elaine Chang, Group General Manager, Greater China, Visa, stated: “The next chapter of commerce will be shaped by increasingly connected digital ecosystems and new AI-powered experiences. Our partnership with Tencent gives us an opportunity to help connect those experiences to Visa’s global network, opening more ways for consumers to pay and businesses to participate in global commerce, with trust and consumer control at the heart of how we innovate,” speaking for Visa in the release.

The MoU could give travelers and Weixin users more ways onto Visa's network, though most of its terms describe areas to explore rather than products in use. Any service built under it would still have to meet the regulatory, data-governance and security requirements the companies cite.

Visa is pursuing a separate track inside China. The People's Bank of China has approved Visa's “Application to Prepare” a domestic bankcard clearing business, which handles different payment flows from the cross-border acceptance covered by the MoU. Visa Information Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd. must complete its preparations within a year before applying to begin operations.